The key to running Save the Children: supply chain management
The key to running Save the Children: supply chain management
Last year, Save the Children helped more than 105 million children in 115 countries, responding to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine as well as natural disasters and pursuing long-term objectives like improving access to education and reducing food insecurity. But the bulk of the cost of humanitarian responses like these isn’t food or shelter — it’s supply chain management, according to research from HELP Logistics.
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Janti Soeripto about running Save the Children U.S. She has been president and CEO of the U.S. organization since 2020, and before that, she was an executive at Save the Children International.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: I want to start with you, actually. You come from decades in corporate America. You’re an econ-finance person by education. How did you wind up in this field?
Janti Soeripto: Yes, I get asked that a lot. When I came out of grad school in Europe, actually, I joined Unilever, a large multinational company, because I was very keen to actually get working abroad. I figured if I join a large multinational, that will get me abroad. And indeed it did. Within five years I was in Asia. But I did think, you know, is there another way to use some of my skills to actually have more direct impact on people? If you are working for large consumer packaged-goods companies, you do try to make everyday products for everyday people all the time.
Ryssdal: You sound just like a corporate person, I’m gonna say.
Soeripto: But that also makes you very aware of the scores of people who actually could not afford our products. So I’m like, OK, how do I make my impact more direct? And then I got sort of lucky. I bumped into Save the Children. They said, oh, here’s this — this is 12 years ago — we have this role. Would you like to join? And I thought well, let’s give it a try.
Ryssdal: To give people a sense of scale, so you’ve been involved with Save the Children International for a long time. Now you’re running Save the Children U.S. Give us a sense, what does your organization do?
Soeripto: So Save the Children was founded over 100 years ago by this amazing woman, Eglantyne Jebb, in the United Kingdom, and she was particularly aggravated about the fact that children in Germany and Austria were dying of starvation after World War I. We’re talking 1919. We are now an organization that has over 25,000 colleagues across 115 countries. We have an annual spend budget of almost $3 billion, and we do emergency responses, whether they are earthquakes or conflict-affected settings, but we also do long-term education or livelihoods work across all kinds of countries, including here in the United States.
Ryssdal: The other thing that struck me as I was thinking about this interview, there’s this great video of something that you all did, and I apologize for not remembering the specifics. But the number of times supply chain imagery came up in that video — big cargo airplanes, trucks, passing goods hand to hand — the idea that so much of what you do depends on logistics and supply chains, actually just sort of surprised me in a way that really shouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose.
Soeripto: Yeah, people always say to me, oh, is it very different from what you did before in the private sector? And I’m like, well, more things are the same. Getting stuff from A to B on time, in full, with good quality, at optimal cost is exactly what is required in this, in this sector. So I think over the years, we’ve really professionalized that area of our work. When I joined now, you know, over 12 years ago, I would say we were definitely less organized and less structured, and we had fewer systems than a large multinational consumer packaged-goods company would have. And it’s hard, right? When you’re [a nongovernmental organization], you always have to make trade-offs. Where do we spend our money? Does it go to children now? Oh, no, we do need a supply chain system. But now I’m very proud of our supply chain infrastructure. We have over 300 warehouses. We procure a half a billion dollars every year from blankets and backpacks and food to medicine and whatever else is needed to help children in emergencies.
Ryssdal: And it occurs to me, you’re doing it under the most horrible of conditions. Not just hurricanes here in the United States, but Gaza, Ukraine, right?
Soeripto: Oh yes. I always say to my, you know, old private-sector people, to do the supply chain under our circumstances, you ain’t seen nothing yet. That takes a level of determination and creativity that is quite something else.
Ryssdal: I think you said somewhere, or it was said about the work that your organization does, there are more children now in need who are in war zones or disaster areas than there have been in generations.
Soeripto: Yeah, certainly since World War II. Yeah, absolutely.
Ryssdal: This is your job. What do you do with that?
Soeripto: You, first of all, you accept that you cannot help every child everywhere, all the time. You have to accept it. You have to make that leap. And sometimes we also have to extract ourselves out of areas because there’s not sustainable funding, for instance. And if you can’t do it well, it’s better not to do it. Which is a hard thing to do in this sector because people think, well, do something. But if you can’t sustain it, you’re sometimes doing more harm.
Ryssdal: Worse to go in and give false hope?
Soeripto: Yes, false hope. And also do it badly. Because if you do it and you start to make shortcuts on the safety with which you do it, the safety and security for your staff and colleagues, but also for the children that you serve, then you’re better off not doing it. But still, it’s sometimes hard to say we would like to do this, but we can only do half of it.
Ryssdal: How do you know that what you do is working? This is the metrics problem, right? How do you measure your success?
Soeripto: And again, there it is sometimes different from the private sector, where I knew every day what we sold, what consumers thought. You know, if they don’t like your product, they walk away. And sadly, sometimes I wish the people that we help could walk away if we weren’t good enough. But they, sadly, don’t have that choice, right? So we have to, internally, be much better at wanting to do, to deliver the best possible product or service at the best possible cost.
Ryssdal: But it does kind of ring hollow to have the metric be we delivered, you know, 14,000 meals today to Rafah [in the Gaza Strip], right? Yes, it’s important but …
Soeripto: Yeah, you can count it, but it’s not necessarily what counts. And we have to live with that. So sometimes we say, OK, what can we count that does matter, right? And there are always things that you can do to understand that. How many kids benefited from this education program? And in a certain case, you can absolutely test them, right? We test baselines. What are they like going in, what are they like going out, and is there significant difference? But sometimes it’s harder, right? If you stop early child marriage in a country, which impacts 12 million girls every year, they get married off before often the age of 15 because their parents see no other option because of poverty, because of safety, because of cultural norms, et cetera. If you find a way to stop it, we can measure then how many girls are not married off early. It does have a huge knock-on effect, but you have to sort of use some proxies in order to get there.
Ryssdal: You are, sadly, in a business the need for which will never go away.
Soeripto: No. And sadly, it’s actually a growth market as we speak, which I wish I wouldn’t have to say. But that is certainly the case.
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